[UPDATED AUGUST 4: SEE BELOW]. Just as we awake in Canada to such improbable headlines as “Census clamour wakes sleeping nation,” yet another Vancouver expatriate (remember Edison Chen?) has arisen in a faraway region of the global village to provide relief — conceivably comic and perhaps tragic too? Canadians are bound to think that the [...]

[UPDATED AUGUST 6]. Does it make any difference to the rest of Canada (to say nothing of the still wider global village) just who will be elected mayor of Canada’s current biggest city this coming October 25, 2010? The obvious answer is no, of course not. “Let’s All Hate Toronto,” and all that. But then [...]

“So all we’re saying,” Treasury Board President Stockwell Day has urged in defence of the current plan to abandon the long-form census, “is this should not be mandatory.” Canadians, Mr. Day believes, should not be compelled by the long arm of the law to “tell some unknown bureaucrat” about their home life, work, and ethnic [...]

Two apparently widely read columns from the New York Times this past weekend finally brought home, for me at any rate, some new hard truths about the changing mood in the USA today: “There’s a Battle Outside and It Is Still Ragin’” by Frank Rich, and Maureen Dowd’s “You’ll Never Believe What This White House [...]

[UPDATED AUGUST 6: SEE BELOW]. Our first thought was just a very short post on “Conrad Black released from jail on $2-million bail.” No more than two sentences say — to underline the point that this news is not important, even in Canada where Mr. Black was born. But part of the trouble with Conrad [...]

I rarely agree with Peter Worthington, the right-wing militarist journalist who has done so much for the Toronto Sun. But I think he is onto something in the case of Captain Robert Semrau. A native of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Captain Semrau was granted an “exemplary discharge” from the British army before joining the Canadian forces. [...]

UPDATED JULY 21 [see below]. My first reaction to the evolving long-form census issue in Canadian federal politics was stark disbelief. Noting how it has progressed hand in hand with the rising heat in this apparently hotter-than-ever-before summer, however, I have come to see it as a rational phenomenon among people suffering from increasing degrees [...]

The impossible dream of a single national securities regulator for Canada summarizes many intractable problems of our congenitally elusive Canadian national unity in the early 21st century. And as the Reuters agency has just explained: “Canada’s current minority Conservative government has come closer than any of its predecessors to launching” such an organization. But “it [...]

“Why are you keeping these things if you’re never going to look at them again?”? It’s a good question. So I recently re-read Jonathan Raban’s review of? The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by the estimable William Langewiesche, in the August 12, 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books. [...]

[UPDATED JULY 10, 13]. It is a sign of the strange waters Canadian federal politics are in these days that the Harper minority government’s current omnibus budget bill may be stuck in the still unreformed Senate of Canada. The Canadian Press reports: “The Tories are threatening a fall election after opposition senators stripped contentious provisions [...]